Friday, June 25, 2010

Wizards of the Coast has upon their site a excellent, and more importantly FREE, archive of papercraft models scaled for use with DnD and Pathfinder miniatures (28mm-30mm) and is an excellent resource for creating some nice playing aids and accessories for your campaigns. Trust me your players will be floored if you whip out the covered bridge section with some nasty beasty residing under the bridge only to emerge when they try to cross!

However the problem is all of the models all geared for a generic fantasy realm, e.g. Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, etc. All are based upon the classic medieval Tudor building style, which is great if that's what you want. However what if you're playing a different genre say the like recently released dnd 4.0 Dark Sun Setting where buildings are more adobe styled constructions, perhaps a post apocalyptic gama world where stacked cookie cutter buildings are blasted out here and there, or western styled campaign and those houses of the oakies are made of sod, those building might not fit in exactly how you would like. The problem compounds itself further if the players are spending a lot of time in a location or using it as a base of operations. Also you might be like me and like to tweak the images regardless to add your own flair and style.

So with that said, I've and created the first, in what I hope is a series, "template" you can use to customize to your hearts content. The first offering are two "cottage buildings", one large (roughly 4in. x 3.5in) and one small( roughly 2inx2in)...

Lip Style Roof

You can search for images to use on your favorite search engine for example wall textures, window styles, roof materials and other architecture features and styles. Once you find a image, or multiple ones, you can then using a graphics application, such as gimp, ms paint, and of course Photoshop, and copy and paste those images into the templates then crop our any extra things you don't want. Once done you can then just print out the template on some nice 110lb. card-stock and you're good to go. Just be sure to make sure your printer is set for 300 dpi and that you settings are printing the full size and not "scaling" the images to fit the page. (They are all single 8.5in.x11in. pages) You could also just print out the blank templates and allow your young ones create with crayons, markers, or colored pencils their own buildings and you could then use to play with (Mom and Dad will have to put em together however.)

If you would like to know how to put paper craft buildings together or the basics of paper craft modeling and what tools you'll need wizards has a nicepdf with instructions herefor these buildings,But all you really need is some glue, a hobby knife or snap box cutter, and a metal straight edge, and a little time. One nice thing to do after you've built a few of these is to use markers to "edge" the corners and areas where you've scored the paper and exposed the white cards stock underneath. I usually have a brown, black and grey marker to do edging with as the ink just soaks into the rough scored edge and covers up the bright white. (I'll create another post at some point showing the difference in between a "edged" and an "non-edged" structure. It really doesn't take much extra time at all.

Cap Style Roof

You can create similar shaped cottages to the Tudor buildings with different exteriors or you can create a "box" like building similar to those seen in dry or desert climates (Dark Sun Anybody?!), and even stack them up for a multiple level effect. I've created two flat box roof types that can be either used to cap or inverted to create a lip around a buildings top. With a little trimming you can even fit the tops down into the buildings walls and create a building similar to those seen in iraq where the roofs have high walls which provide partial cover. the other trick is you can also flip them over and put your buildings on top of the flat box roofs and use them as foundations (see the top image, the white 1/4 box that the buildings are sitting on top of are the roofs!) Lots of variations you can create here with just two building templates!

If you have any comments or come up with some niffty buildings of your own feel free to post and comment below, I'd really like to see what people come up with and if this is something that you all would like to see more of.